The day she showed up at work with a black eye, Anna Mena, a department-store manager in New York City, could tell that her coworkers were alarmed. Finally, a close friend approached: Was everything fine at home? Mena admitted the truth: Her 5-year-old, who shared a bed with her and her husband most nights, had given her a swift kick in the face mid-slumber while flinging himself into a new position. She'd fled to the bathroom, crying tears of pain; her son slept right through it.

"Wow," said her colleague, once convinced that Mena, 42, wasn't a battered wife. "I guess it's time to get that kid out of your bed." Mena could not have agreed more.

Two years later, the thrasher still flails his way through his sleep cycles next to his parents, despite their best efforts to get him to sleep on his own. His parents have been bruised. They have been thwarted. Now, says his mother, they are mostly resigned.

Mena never thought she would be the kind of mom who puts up with a second-grader in her bed, though she is comforted by one thing: "Every single one of my friends has a child who ends up visiting them at night."

Cosleeping with babies is one of those hot-button issues that elicits sermonizing from otherwise reasonable parents on both sides of the debate. And no wonder, with the stakes so high: Bed-sharing puts babies at higher risk for sudden infant death syndrome (the position of the American Academy of Pediatrics). Still, some attachment-parenting gurus insist it can be done safely, and that it's the only arrangement a loving parent could choose.

Then there is the other family bed phenomenon — the more covert one, in which older children of 5 or 10 come, pitter-patter, into their parents' rooms in the middle of the night or start out sleeping there, kids who prefer Mom and Dad's bed to their own. Whether or not they deliberately make this sleep choice, parents often keep it a secret, concerned they'll be judged as overindulgent or codependent at best — or creepy and perverse at worst. Never mind what it suggests about their sex life.

Angelina Jolie, already something of a maternal iconoclast, has none of that shame: She recently told Vanity Fair that she and Brad Pitt regularly let their six kids, ages 15 months to 8 years, pile into their bed. When you've got that many, apparently, even a custom-made 9-foot bed won't shield you from the kids' nocturnal rustlings. "Mommy and Daddy are very tired the next morning," she said.

Yeah, tell us about it. A growing number of parents are squeezing their children into their standard kings and queens. Experts estimate that about 15 percent of families have children ages 5 and up with whom they share a bed for part or all of the night, several times a week. "Cosleeping with grade-school children and beyond is much more common than anyone would imagine," notes James McKenna, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology who runs the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN. "I've spoken to college kids who curl up at night with Mom and Dad. The older the child, the quieter parents get about it."

Some experts link the trend to rising rates of breast-feeding, as more moms start bed-sharing at birth — despite safety warnings — and never stop. Other parents just find it hard to part with their kids at bedtime. Raised on a culture of therapy, memoir, and Oprah, moms and dads today are exquisitely sensitive to the trials of childhood, which apparently includes the separations that occur on a nightly basis — or would, if everyone stayed in their own beds.

Some parents will tell you that cosleeping can be a cozy, manageable comfort for a family. Such is the idyllic scenario Sherry Perdue, 46, and her husband, who run their own business in Blacksburg, VA, describe. Their 5- and 7-year-olds fall asleep around 7:30 p.m. in their parents' bed, and the couple joins them later. "Their bunk bed is for play more than sleep," says Perdue. She feels closer to her children and cherishes morning together time. "That's when my son feels comfortable bringing up anything, like a fight he had with his brother," she says. "I'm not sure he'd come to me during the day the way he does when he's quietly reflecting at that time."

Many experts out there see nothing wrong with sharing a bed, as long as couples carve out intimate time for themselves. "If both parents agree on the arrangement and everyone gets enough sleep, cosleeping is absolutely fine," says Jodi Mindell, Ph.D., a psychologist and vice chair of the board of directors for the National Sleep Foundation. "It's a choice that families make."

For certain parents, it's the only workable solution. Juliana Olivarez, 39, a kindergarten teacher and a single mother of two in Tucson, AZ, coslept with her son from birth to 13. "Otherwise, we'd never have gotten any sleep," she says. "He had night terrors when he slept alone."

She tried the techniques doctors recommended: offering positive rewards, sitting by his bed in a folding chair and inching farther away each night. Nothing helped. Friends gave her grief, but she had little patience for it: "These people don't have night after night of no sleep."

Olivarez has thrown in the towel, but other parents persist in returning kids to their own beds, as often as 20 times a night. "We've truly flunked the sleep part of parenting," says one mom from Athens, GA. On some nights, this is her setup: a 4-year-old, a 7-year-old, and one of two parents crammed into the bottom bunk of an Ikea bed. One child insists on parental company, and her sibling, jealous, slides in for good measure.

Musical beds are a recurring theme among families that reluctantly cosleep, says family therapist Jennifer Waldburger, coauthor of The SleepEasy Solution and cofounder of the Sleepy Planet consultancy in Los Angeles. She worked with one family that started out nights in their own beds, but by dawn, the kids, ages 6 and 9, occupied the master bed, with the dad relegated to the couch and the mom in the guest room. "It's amazing the lengths parents will go to to do what they believe is best for their family," Waldburger says.

But is this the best thing for kids? "I worry about the children who know that their parents want them out of the bed but can't make it happen," says Jean Kunhardt, a family therapist and cofounder of SoHo Parenting, a New York City counseling center. "These children have a lot of guilt and feel like they're disappointing their parents."

Kids who crash their parents' beds are also less likely to get a good night's rest than their solo-sleeping peers, adds Rachel Steinberg, a sleep consultant in Boulder, CO. "There's a full interruption in sleep, and it affects the quality." Tired kids are at risk for academic issues; pooped parents may not perform as well at work. And both fatigued kids and parents may put on extra weight.

Therapists worry that kids whose parents can't get them out of their bed might have other separation issues. "I see children not meeting age-appropriate expectations, like doing homework alone, only to find out in passing that the child is cosleeping," says Valerie Levine, Ph.D., a psychologist in Hendersonville, NC, and author of Break the Cosleeping Habit. Another milestone that may slide: "We aren't teaching these kids to self-soothe," says Cora Breuner, Ph.D., associate professor of adolescent medicine at Seattle Children's Hospital. They may, for instance, overly rely on parents to calm them when they're upset. And obviously, continues Breuner, "they're not learning how to fall asleep on their own."

Sneaking in Sex

And now, the question no one feels comfortable asking a cosleeping parent: What about your sex life? Some couples cope by having it whenever and wherever. "You end up in the living room, not someplace you'd ordinarily be," says Mena (the one with the black eye). "It's adventurous." The Georgia couple who cosleep in a bunk bed have sex when the kids are at school, since both parents have flexible schedules.

Michelle Gamble-Risley, a 44-year-old publisher from Fair Oaks, CA, says she and her husband are so used to their 6-year-old daughter showing up at night that it's hard to relax when the mood strikes. "It's like, Hey, hurry up, she's on her way — we can feel it," says Gamble-Risley.

Beth Abelson Gentle, 42, a stay-at-home mom in Oro Valley, AZ, and her husband have been woken up in the night so many times by their 8-year-old that even when he's on a sleepover at a friend's, they've stopped out of habit, mid-sex, to lock the door. Gentle can now almost laugh at the time her son pounded on their door, sobbing, while she and her husband finished what they were up to. Afterward, they found him fast asleep in the hallway, at which point her husband picked him up — and brought him into their bed.

Kunhardt has seen in her therapy practice just how tension over cosleeping can strain a marriage. "If you can't safeguard your nights and you give yourself over to parenting 24/7, how can you protect your relationship?"

Even parents who are happy with their family bed often wonder when the time is right for their child to move on. Most experts agree that kids should be sleeping on their own by adolescence. "For kids entering puberty, cosleeping can be uncomfortable, confusing, and even inappropriate," Breuner says.

Meanwhile, cosleeping parents let it ride and savor moments of sweetness. "I love how my son sleeps with my hand under his cheek," Mena says. Though there are nights when she and her husband wish they were alone, what's most important is that their son feels safe and sound. "He's staying," she says, "until he's ready to go."